About Splinter Collective
Splinter Art and Community Fund (DBA Splinter Collective, or Splinter) is a 501c3 non-profit membership based organization, event space, art studio warehouse, and fiscal sponsor located in Cukson aka Tucson, Arizona. Splinter Collective is housed in an historic Adobe warehouse located on occupied Tohono O’odham and Yoeme (Pascua Yaqui) lands. The warehouse was originally built in 1920 to store farm equipment and has evolved many times over the years. It sits on the border of the Dunbar Spring and Barrio Anita neighborhoods just northwest of the historic arts warehouse district. It has been in the hands of artists since the 1960s and has held legendary rent parties and concerts. We love to hear your stories — drop us a line if you have them!
Our mission statement:
Splinter Collective’s mission is to promote the arts and social justice in Southern Arizona, and serve as a local artistic and community hub. We center the artistic expression, voices, and experiences of folks who are systematically disenfranchised and historically absent from the centers of power. We do this through culture making, curating artistic events, providing an accessible venue for community events, liberatory art practices, social justice organizing, and fiscally sponsoring aligned projects.
Our Board of Directors and executive team are 100% composed of people who have various intersecting marginalized identities. These include specifically Black, Indigenous, POC, LGBTQIA+, Disabled, and neurodivergent folks, and folks with lived experience of sex work, housing insecurity, incarceration and more.
We acknowledge our place in space and the complex history of exploitation that is settler colonialism. By nurturing community building across divisions and cultivating deeply representative leadership, Splinter strives to promote partnership, inclusivity, diversity, and abolition.
*Shout out to Kimberlé Crenshaw who originated the term “intersectionality” and explains it as “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.”
Acknowledging our place in space, and understanding our role in our neighborhood is central to our mission and identity. As an art and social justice organization, Splinter is deeply committed to anti-racism, decolonization, community partnership, mutual aid, anti-capitalism, housing justice, disability justice, addressing climate change, anti-gentrification, eviction defense and promotion of the arts.
We center the voices and artistic visions of marginalized communities and art geared towards social change. We are thrilled to include and support in particular LGBTQIA+ artists, women artists, disabled artists, BIPOC artists, border artists, our unsheltered neighbors, and other community groups.
We believe that private property is a colonial concept, and while we must live in the world we do, we try to change the way that feels in this corner of the world. We practice radical hospitality by offering our space on a sliding scale basis, both for space usage and artistic events. We reinvest into improving the space to be more inclusive and accessible and paying our staff a fair wage. We will always put people before capital, and planet before profit. We believe in the radical redistribution of goods and care.
Splinter Art and Community Fund is a registered 501c3 non-profit, our FEIN is 86-1918619 and all donations are tax-deductible.
We honor the lands we occupy, and the labor of all those workers past, present, and future who built and maintain the space. We honor the legacy of all the artists who brought their visions and talents to these walls. We honor people in all of their complexity and hope to anchor a place of safety and belonging.
About the Directors
Splinter Collective is shepherded by Executive Director and founder Natalie Brewster Nguyen, along with the directing team, Ezra J Wayland, Akasia Oberly, and Danya Xena, our Board of Directors, amazing staff, and volunteers.
Natalie Brewster Nguyen is an accomplished performance and installation artist, writer, educator, and community activist. They have a long history of working with community organizations and fighting for social change. Nat can be found at nataliebrewsternguyen.com and on all social media as @nataliebrewsternguyen
Nat also co-founded social justice consulting company Justice Movement with Danya Xena.
@justicemovement.org_ on Instagram / https://www.justicemovement.org
History
If the walls of the Splinter Bros Warehouse could talk, they would have many stories to tell about the building’s past incarnations.
The Ronstadt family built the adobe warehouse 90 years ago. It served as a storage facility for items ranging from fur coats to medical supplies for St. Mary’s Hospital. High school proms were held there in the ’80s. But it is most remembered from the legendary 1970’s “rent parties” which enshrined the warehouse as an experimental arts collective.
Presently, there are eleven art studios, many areas for site-specific installations and an outdoor stage and garden dedicated to the realization of performance art.
Excerpted from Irene Messina. The Tucson Weekly.